The Best American Infographics 2015

“Represent[s] the full spectrum of the genre—from authoritative to playful.”—Scientific American

“Not only is it a thing of beauty, it’s also a good read, with thoughtful explanations of each winning graphic.”—Nature

“Information, in its raw form, can overwhelm us. Finding the visual form of data can simplify this deluge into pearls of understanding.” —Kim Rees, Periscopic

The most creative and effective data visualizations from the past year, edited by Brain Pickings creator Maria Popova

The rise of infographics across nearly all print and electronic media—from a graphic illuminating the tweets of the women of Isis to a memorable depiction of the national geography of beer—reveals patterns in our lives and the world in often startling ways. The Best American Infographics 2015 showcases visualizations from the worlds of politics, social issues, health, sports, arts and culture, and more. From an elegant graphic comparison of first sentences in classic novels to a startling illustration of the world’s deadliest animals, “You’ll come away with more than your share of . . . mind-bending moments—and a wide-ranging view of what infographics can do” (Harvard Business Review). “This is what information design does at its best – it gives pause, makes visible the unsuspected yet significant invisibilia of life, and by astonishing us into mobilization, it catapults us toward one of the greatest feats of human courage: the act of changing one’s mind.”—from the Introduction by Maria Popova

Guest introducer MARIA POPOVA is the one-woman curation machine behind Brain Pickings, a cross-disciplinary blog showcasing content that makes people smarter. She has more than half a million monthly readers and over 480,000 Twitter followers. Popova is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow and has written for the New York Times, Atlantic, Wired UK, GOODMagazine,The Huffington Post, and the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Series editor GARETH COOK is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, and the editor of Mind Matters, Scientific American’s neuroscience blog. He helped invent the Boston Globe’s Sunday Ideas section and served as its editor from 2007 to 2011. His work has also appeared in NewYorker.com, WIRED, Scientific American, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing.